


The Eyes of Blenheim: Conclusion

by itstonedme



Series: The Eyes of Blenheim [10]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: AU, Edwardian Period, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 20:51:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1278433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itstonedme/pseuds/itstonedme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orlijah meets <i>Downton Abbey</i>.  The year is 1905.  Orlando is the 9th Duke of Marlborough, married to the beautiful Olivia, with two children.  Elijah is his personal valet, a minister's son.  Enormous thanks to Stormatdusk for creating the banner for this series, shown <a href="http://itstonedme.livejournal.com/97277.html">here</a> where this chapter first appeared, February 2014.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: Fiction.  No disrespect intended to any persons, alive or otherwise.</p>
<p>Feedback: Always appreciated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Eyes of Blenheim: Conclusion

**Chapter 10**

Among the household staff, this much is known: Wood has suddenly left Blenheim, apparently due to an undisclosed family matter. Word has it that he will not be returning, which is a shock all on its own. The duke and the duchess are not speaking to one another. They do not ask about each other. They are not dining together. They have cancelled all social engagements due to one of them (who knows whom?) not feeling well, although it doesn't appear to be Her Grace because, if anything, she has increased the occasions in which she has taken to riding over hill and dale, usually not alone and always without her husband. 

This much is _not_ known: whether the "family matter" being given for Wood's departure concerns his family or if it is, in fact, an absolute fabrication to hide something more titillating. The new driver Monaghan is useless for dredging information; if anything, he's got a tighter lip than Wood, which one would have thought impossible. This truly is a shame, since he was the one at the helm of the mysterious flight. It's not known if Wood's dismissal is behind the glacial rapport between Their Graces, but given how enjoyably entrenched Wood had become in the duke's routine, it is very much concluded as a factor and that Her Grace was the instigator. So the gossip then becomes: what prompted Her Grace to oust Wood, and why? Wood was given to being about the stables with the young Lord. Did he perhaps hear or see something whilst there – something concerning Her Grace and that stable manager – that caused Her Grace to want him gone? Oh, how the plot thickens! 

All this, of course, causes the chatterers to pick sides. There's Otto's contingent: if His Grace had paid Her Grace the attention she deserved, she might not have been driven into the arms of a lesser-class, robustly virile temptation like Mortensen. The Duke's contingent, on the other hand, never expresses an opinion. They are above such tripe.

But to a man and a woman, this much is clear: if circumspect, dutiful and devoted Wood – with His Grace's full backing – can find himself caught up in some sort of situation (probably contrived) that prompted his dismissal, what might lie ahead for any one of them? 

And so to varying degrees, they shut their mouths and perform their duties as best they can under the cloud hanging over the estate, and they look for reasons in every direction except the real one. 

*

In London, Elijah is adjusting to having become a kept man. He has taken a flat in Bloomsbury after having been given a tidy packet of money by Orlando to feather their love nest. Through Orlando's aunt Philippa, he has secured employment with an interior decoration firm. 

Philippa has become something of a protector to Elijah, although she is attempting to keep that quiet in case word were to get back to Olivia. In the brief time she has spent getting to know him, she has found him sensitive and serious and completely without guile. ("And who would have suspected he had such an excellent eye for design?" Philippa has taken to telling Orlando.) She drops in at his home for tea when he is not working and for dinner when he is, and not only can he choose a drapery, she has learned that he can cook. She finds this whole new century and its levelling of classes refreshing in so many ways. 

It was not a situation that came about easily. The afternoon that he and Orlando had sat together in Lady's Churchill's parlour, finally alone to discuss Her Grace's discovery of their affair, had begun with Elijah determined that the brief but splendid season he and Orlando had enjoyed had come to an end. He was bereft at having lost what had been the highlight of his career – a position within the household of the 9th Duke of Marlborough. He was terrified of the ensuing shame that would be visited upon him, his family and Orlando. He didn't know how he would ever earn a living again.

And he had lost his only chance at love.

"Everything about our involvement is wrong," Elijah had said, believing that if he said it enough, it would be true. "Everything about us shouldn't work. You are worldly, and I am not. You are titled and I am common. You have wealth and I have nothing. You have a wife and children and a reputation. You will tire of me because of these differences. In time, you will start making excuses as to why you cannot see me. Then you will worry that your secret is not safe with me. You will come to resent me and for ever having started this. While we were able to see each other daily, it was different. But over time and distance, we are doomed. Give me up."

Orlando had come out of his chair at this, dropping to his knees at Elijah's feet and reaching up to grab him roughly by the arms. "I do not give up," he had said fiercely, sternly. "Do you understand me? I do not give up. I never have."

Elijah had stared at him, silenced by the passion and anger of his words.

"Tell me truthfully, Elijah. Do you want me to give up on you? Or is that fear speaking? You will break my heart if this is what you want, but tell me now. And don't be making yourself a sacrifice to spare me. Tell me what is in your heart."

Put that way, there was no course but the truth. "I do not want to lose you." 

"Good. That's all I needed to know. We will find you a home. We will find you work. I will make every effort to come to you as often and as discreetly as I can. You may have left Blenheim in body but not in spirit, and you have not left my heart. I will not let you. I don't know how it will come to be, but one day you will return. You have to keep faith in that."

Elijah had shaken his head and laughed sadly. "Your wife…"

"My wife does not have the constitution to remain my wife."

Elijah's eyes had come up to meet his at that remark, but he had said nothing.

*

Despite passing beneath it several times every week, the north portico ceiling is not something Olivia has ever paid any attention to. She has become so accustomed to workmen popping up in unexpected places that seeing them up on scaffolding within the colonnades of the portico interests her only to the degree that she hopes whatever they are working on will quickly be completed so that guests to Blenheim, few as they are, don't have to be bothered by their clutter. 

The footman has come out to collect from Monaghan her luggage and the boxes she's acquired during a two-day shopping journey to London. As she mounts the stairs, the foreman nods to her politely. To be conversational, she stops to see what his crew is working on, for this is obviously one of Orlando's initiatives. She looks up to where an almost childlike and whimsical tableau is being painted on the ceiling, an arrangement of eyes, almost Masonic in nature. 

For a moment, she thinks that what she is seeing are the eyes of her children, which is a rather touching depiction for Orlando to have portrayed, despite her absolute disregard for him. But that would be wrong, for while Andrew's eyes are brown like his father's, her daughter's eyes are green, like Olivia's mother's. She stares a little longer before the familiarity of what she is seeing dawns on her. She freezes, looking straight ahead into the great hall where she sees Noble hurriedly approaching to greet her. 

"Where is the duke?" she says, advancing towards him, her voice a chill.

"Your Grace," Noble nods in hasty greeting, "He had been in the library…"

"Where, Noble?" she interrupts, and the butler's spine stiffens at the affront.

"I believe the library, Your Grace. But I will look around as well," he adds even though she is already walking away.

When she enters the library, Orlando is still there, quietly reading a book. "I want that image on the portico painted over," she immediately says.

Orlando marks his spot and carefully places the book on his side table. He uncrosses his legs and stands, walking past her to close the library door. He turns back to her. "No," he simply says.

"It's your male whore," she hisses. "You thought I wouldn't be able to tell?"

Orlando walks back to his chair and sits down. "Read into it what you will, Olivia. The fresco stays."

"I will not abide any reminder of his presence in this house," she cries out. "How do you plan to explain it when people ask?"

"I will say it is simply a design that caught my fancy."

She turns toward the door. "Then I will tell the workmen if you will not."

Orlando picks up his book again. "The workmen know that no one is to remove it without my direct order." He opens to his mark. 

She stands, fists at her side. "I will not live with that atrocity, Orlando. It goes." 

Orlando looks up from his book. "I recall hearing you say that once before. Upon my return on the day you drove him out, I told you that he would never leave Blenheim, Olivia. You had laughed and said it looked like he already had. You misread my intentions."

"If it stays, then I will leave, and I will take the children with me."

Orlando places his book mark on the side table. "I would not wish Annabelle to be parted from her mother. I suggest you travel to the continent and take yourself a lover. Unless, of course, you wish to take your lover with you, although I would regret losing Mortensen, he's a good horseman. But you will not take my son. He will stay with his entail."

"You will not separate me from Andrew," she warns.

"Not if you stay. That is your choice, Olivia. Otherwise, I doubt there is a court in the kingdom that would give a foreign mother married to a title the precedent of removing an heir from his father and his estate. I really think you'd find yourself up against a wall on that count. But feel free to try."

"This is not fair!" she cries out. "I saved you. All I ever wanted was a happy marriage and your love!"

This stops Orlando and he sighs, settling the book in his lap before he looks at her. "I don't expect you to believe me, but I sympathize, Olivia. Life is not fair. All I ever wanted was love as well. I know that you were dealt by your parents into the arms of a man who could not love you. When I say that you should find yourself a lover, what I truly hope is that you might find someone who will love you as you should be loved. If you leave, I will not contest a divorce, nor will I deprive you of the comfortable living to which you are accustomed. If you choose not to divorce me, that is fine as well. But I think we have reached the understanding that we can no longer live here with any degree of harmony." 

"Don't think that the world won't come to learn what you are," she seethes, for her wound is still too raw to grasp the reality of his words. "You will wage against rumours for the rest of your life."

"As will you, Olivia," Orlando says. "Separation and divorce have a way of doing that. But we've been living with them here in Blenheim for months now, and we seem to have managed."

She is out of the room before he can find the place on the page where he left off.

*

Orlando hires a different hansom every time he visits Elijah. Sometimes he arrives from a business appointment; other times, he walks a few blocks from his aunt's flat where he usually stays on his London trips, and hires a cab at a meter stand. Monaghan gets the day to wander about London, leaving the car parked. 

Orlando has not hired another valet since Elijah left. He hasn't seen the need. One of the footman has been promoted to help out, but it's not a formal arrangement. When Orlando travels, he doesn't bring the young man along. It would only be a complication, and Orlando has become more self-sufficient now that he has to choose his own clothes and run his own bath water.

"What's the word when I'm not at the dinner table?" he asks his aunt during one visit after they've returned from a soiree. He has re-entered society with his aunt on his arm, and Blenheim once again welcomes guests, usually with Philippa up from town serving as hostess.

"About you and Olivia?"

Orlando looks up over the rim of his tea cup and blinks in agreement.

"You know how it goes. There is great sympathy for you having been abandoned by your wife, that she was a title seeker, that she was having a dalliance with a hired man, that she left her son behind. Just as I am sure that on the continent, there is great sympathy in her quarter, that she was driven away by a callous man who was only after her money, who bred with her only for the purpose of his lineage, and so on and so forth."

"A rather familiar story, Auntie?" Orlando replies, referring to her own checkered past.

"Different names, different reasons, same old bilge water." 

"Thank you for all the tender attention you have paid Elijah."

Philippa's eyes crinkle with soft amusement. "He's such a strange little man, but quite engaging. He is so serious in temperament most times, and then in an instant, he'll have me in fits with some terribly naughty observation and mimicry. He is quite a bit of fun that way."

Orlando can only smile at this. That Elijah should slowly have metamorphosed into a social creature, comfortable in the company of his superiors, conversant and observant, is endlessly rewarding.

But how he misses not having him in his daily life. 

*

"You've made this flat a wonderfully warm and welcoming place," Orlando says one afternoon within the comfort of the bed he is sharing with Elijah. "When I'm not here, I look forward to returning every moment of the day. And when I'm here, I dread ever having to leave it."

It is early in April, and sunlight floods the room on a day in which no one needs to know where they are.

"What's the news of Her Grace?" Elijah asks, old habits of address dying hard. He lies with his bare feet snuggled at Orlando's side, head propped against the foot board of the sleigh bed. Opposite him, Orlando relaxes at the head board, and between them, they share a sheet, pulled up to their waists, with two plates of finger sandwiches resting on their stomachs. A pillow tray sits nearby with a cozied pot of tea and chinaware. 

"Olivia has apparently taken comfort in the arms of the Duke of Ravenna," Orlando says, and there's no bitterness to it. "He's not a bad fellow, from what I hear, although I fear it may not be the union she needs. While there have been times when I regret being born a homosexual, I sometimes think being born a woman must be worse. So little say in the important affairs of life. I would go mad." 

"That may be changing," Elijah says. "I work with several very talented designers who are women. In many ways, they are superior to most of their male colleagues. Maybe that is because their lives have been spent in rooms and have been for generations. But they have this enormous history of knowing as a result. They see interior spaces very differently, very practically and beautifully. And these women have strong opinions about their circumstances in society and the workplace. They want the vote."

"Wouldn't _that_ smarten the rest of us up!" Orlando grins. "Can you imagine a world of Philippas having a say in our affairs?"

"Did Mortensen go with her?" Elijah asks, returning to the subject of the duchess.

"No. She asked, from what he told me, but he came to me right afterwards, asking if there was still a place for him within my management given that he had betrayed my trust. Maybe I'm a fool, but I couldn't fault the man for having fallen for a rich, beautiful, lonely woman who'd set her eyes in his direction." Orlando chuckles. "He told me, very seriously, that if it was of any consequence, he always ensured that he pulled out in time."

Elijah grins, and pokes him with his foot. "More than you can say."

"Olivia took the nanny and Otto as well, although good riddance to the last. Saved me the bother." Their luncheon is just about done. "It's time I changed and got a cab back to Philippa's," Orlando says, tracing a toe lightly over one of Elijah's nipples. "I told Monaghan we'd be leaving for home late afternoon."

"I suspect that he knows about us," Elijah says.

Orlando strips off the sheet and swings his legs over the side of the bed. "I suspect he does too, but he doesn't need to know that we know he knows." He smiles. "He's a decent chap. I'll send him to bring you up to Blenheim on Friday. Does mid-day work?"

*

The season is still sufficiently cool that in a moving car, Elijah needs a long coat with a muffler wrapped several times around his neck. He sits in the front seat beside Monaghan so that they might talk during the journey despite their not having seen each other since that day back in the fall. Elijah is not one to pretend to be other than Monaghan's class, regardless of the fact that he is the duke's weekend guest.

"You must have mixed feelings about returning," Monaghan says when they are more than half way there. 

Elijah remembers that it is precisely Monaghan's direct manner that appealed to him in the first place. He's cut straight to the chase and dismissed the family excuse as fabricated bunk. After all the gossip and innuendo about Her Grace that has been not-so-quietly circulating, Elijah sees no point in covering fact. "I do," he says. "I was happy there. It ended badly."

"But you seem happy now." 

"I am," Elijah smiles. "Funny how things work out. The last time I made this drive, I didn't think I would ever be happy again."

"It's not my business to know what happened, but that day, I could tell it wasn't good."

Elijah glances at him, a smile curling one side of his mouth. "That would be an understatement," he says, side-stepping the reason for his dismissal. "I was stunned to have been let go. It was something I never saw coming, something that had never happened to me before." Monaghan doesn't need to know any more than that.

Monaghan returns the smile. "And yet, as you said, it has all worked out." Wood doesn't need to know that his relationship with the duke, such as it is, is safe with him. Birds of a feather and all that. 

Soon enough, they are approaching the town of Woodstock, and Elijah cannot help but feel his pulse quicken as the imposing majesty of Blenheim appears on the horizon. The grounds are enormous, and they easily drive five minutes, the palace looming larger, before turning onto the long lane leading to the flagstaff gate. As they pass beneath it, Elijah sits forward and looks up, hands gripping the dash. He marvels at how his relationship to Blenheim has been shaped by his relationship with Orlando, of how he will always have an abiding affection for Orlando's ancestral home, the calamity of the past year notwithstanding. 

Monaghan glances to him. "Welcome back, mate," he smiles quietly.

They pass through the Kitchen Court, past maintenance workers going about their chores, on through the courtyard gate to the wide expanse surrounded on three sides by arms of the palace and which had at one time served as a parade ground. As the car starts its long curve to park at the base of the north portico steps, Elijah sees a child sitting on the top flight. It is Lord Andrew, who jumps to his feet as the car comes around, calling out to someone inside the opened doorways before hopping down the stairs. He runs to the car, and as Elijah climbs out, throws himself at him, wrapping his little arms around Elijah's hips.

"I'm so glad you're back," the boy exclaims. "Are you here to stay? I can trot on my pony because I'm taller now! Can you tell? Mortensen's been teaching me. Oh, I have so much to show you."

Elijah reaches down and ruffles his hair. "I'm here for two days, long enough for you to show me everything new. I'll be back again soon, and I promise for longer." He looks up to where Orlando stands at the top of the staircase, waiting and smiling.

Andrew grabs Elijah's hand, practically pulling him up the steps. "Everyone wants to see you! They are all waiting!"

As Elijah gains the top of the flight, Orlando steps forward and grips his arm, eyes sparkling. "It's good to have you back," he says, angling his head briefly towards the interior of the palace to indicate that there are others watching. Behind him, through the doors and across the great hall, Elijah can see Noble, Mrs. Blanchett, several familiar footmen and house maids as well as a few unfamiliar faces, all lined up as if he were someone of standing, waiting for him with smiles. "I asked them to wait inside."

"Look, Wood," the boy says, pointing to the ceiling of the portico. "Here's something new. Look at what Daddy had painted on the ceiling."

Elijah looks up at the fresco. The breath falls from his lips, and he cannot speak.

"I once made you a promise that you would never leave Blenheim," Orlando says quietly. "Nor that you would ever leave me. Now we shall always be here together, Elijah, no matter what life holds for us. Welcome home."

[ ](http://s227.photobucket.com/user/itstonedme/media/Day593CourtyardporticoceilingBlenheimPalace_zps332e44cd.jpg.html)

The End

**Author's Note:**

>  _Author's note:_ My great thanks to Tweedle_ who took me to Blenheim on a visit in 2010, when this picture was taken. I remember looking up and thinking, "Brown eyes, blue eyes. Now _there's_ a story." But for the _real_ reason behind the eyes, go [here](http://www.nickcoxarchitects.co.uk/blenheim_palace_ceiling.asp).


End file.
